Blog posts from CYBAEA

Based on Ronald Coase’s theory of firms, Lars Plougmann argues that transparency is the next big thing, and offers specific advice for professional services. The core of his argument is that because trasactional costs for companies are ever decreasing, the business relationships that really add value are the ones where you are sharing business processes.

Managed to catch up and read The Economist this weekend. Their survey, The new kings of capitalism (subscription required for most articles – do yourself a favor and subscribe), considers the private equity industry and is recommended reading.

Any article that concludes in its very first sentence that consulting is an industry that never goes out of style is bound to appeal to my consultant’s heart. The conclusions of Francesca Gino’s studies, as summaried in The Hidden Cost of Buying Information(Sadly lost to bit rot on the internet) over at HBS Working Knowledge, are not surprising to me: when you pay money for advice, you are more likely to use it. Our industry has built that into our fee rates, thank you for pointing it out. But there are still a few surprises in the study.

The applications of social software to the enterprise will profoundly change our business culture and therefore it will be a substantial force for shaping what our society will look like in the future. To understand the fundamental changes that are influencing us right now, changes of which social software is one manifestation, and to try to predict where it may lead us, we should look to the past where strikingly similar forces applied to society and science lead to the most significant cultural change in Europe and arguably the world.

Natural science is well known for using mathematical models over “common sense” and intuition, to the frustration of many students. The use of mathematics in social sciences is newer, and it is probably fair to say that this discipline is still not as completely reliant on mathematical models as for example modern physics.

Michael Jackson, the chariman of Elderstreet Investments and Sage and an expereinced entrepreneur and investor, writes in Business XL about the eight tell-tale signs that a business is on the way down. Following his list, we summarise and add our own observations.

I am re-reading the classic articles from the Harvard Business Review, and the 1975 article by Henry Mintzberg titled The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact is not only as relevant as ever, but in the light of developments in using social tools in the workspace, Mintzberg seems to be advocating corporate blogging:

I have an interest in social software in the enterprise - the use of tools like blogs, wikis, document management, rss, communities, discussion boards, and so on within large organisations to foster “bottom up” knowledge management, collaboration, etc.

Geoffrey A. Moore has an important article in the July-August 2004 issue of the Harvard Business Review. Articulating and systematising what we probably already understand at some level, Mr. Moore proposes a taxonomy of innovation and reminds us how different types of innovation are relevant at different stages of the market lifecycle from disruptive innovation in the early markets through to structural innovation near the end of life of the market for a particular product or service offering. The article also provides a useful summary of the type of leader best associated with each type of innovation.

CYBAEA

CYBAEA are value and growth architects for the data economy. We are passionate about value creation and delivering commercial results. We help organizations identify and act upon opportunities in Customer Value Management (CVM), Customer Experience (CX) and Advocacy, and Innovation and Growth.